In an ideal world, perhaps, I'd rather have one book done by one creative team. But if the economic reality compels more Spider-Man comics than one creative team can produce, I'd rather they were heavily co-ordinated and working as a team to tell a single story.
Since there certainly seems to be many writers who can wrie three comics a month, I wonder if they couldn't try and get a single writer to do this, and simply alternate artists? Particularly given that this will help alleviate the otherwise intense need for a very strong, good editor.
Incidentally, I don't read X-Men these days (except the Whedon run in trades), but I'm curious if it wouldn't be different for that book because my very vague impression -- from reading your reviews more than anything else (I don't find it interesting to read X-Men, but your reviews are always worth a read. Go figure.) -- is that there are a *lot* of different X-characters floating around these days. Surely that's a reason to have multiple books (whereas with Spider-Man, obviously there's only one central character, so keeping things separate is much harder)? Or, given that you obviously know the facts here and I don't, let me turn around and make it a question: why isn't it the case that the vast number of characters makes keeping sepearate x-books going reasonable, simply using different characters in each?
I can't see it working for X-Men as it would for Spider-Man (and I truly see scheduling problems in the futures for Amazing Spider-Man, if the past is any indication of punctuality on Marvel's part).
X-Men is a team book and can get away with two teams of five people, and therefore two separate titles. Now, the other books, Exiles, Excalibur and New X-Men, they can all go by the wayside. But having two X-Men books, with X-Factor still there doing it's noir thing and Wolverine being a mess over there in a corner, is perfectly fine for an X-Men lineup. 4 books, with a mini here or there.
Although with Messiah Complex coming up, Marvel will probably launch a fourth X-Men book. It's just their way of doing things. That is, not thinking things through.
For what it's worth, according to the Cup O' Joe panel report, Brevoort expressed a similar sentiment to Stephen here, but they're not ruling anything out.
Personally, I agree with Paul. While there are certainly enough characters for three or more books, none of them really "feels" like a complete team to me. Mike Carey's book in particular seemed to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for characters beyond Rogue and Iceman, and I'm not sure how much of that is his preference and how much was just that everybody else was spoken for.
If I were reading Spider-Man, I'd drop it after the merger.
When I did read Spider-Man in the past, I read generally one title at a time. My choice would be based on its style, which was a combination of the writer, the kinds of stories it told, what characters it used, and all sorts of other factors. I generally read only one title because I didn't *want* the other books.
I don't currently buy Amazing Spider-Man, but my brother gets the graphic novels and I read them. I don't care about Friendly or Sensational.
When books cross over, I no longer buy the book they cross into. I get Carey's X-Men, but I hated the treatment of the Agent X characters in Cable & Deadpool and would not touch the recent X-Men cross-over.
With X-Men, I don't want half the titles that are published. Maybe I don't like the characters. More likely I don't like the stories, the author, or the artwork. Merge the titles and I'll drop them all instead of either pick up books I don't want or wade through trying to figure out which issues I care about (unless the comic shop did it for me.)
A while back, Ibox's Thieves & Kings was becoming increasingly late. The creator was losing touch with the characters and finding it harder to write the stories. He then came up with the plan to turn the book into a "World of Thieves & Kings" collection, which would include new characters unconnected to the main storyline to fill space and maintain the shipping speed. I was somewhat glad when he instead seemingly just stopped writing the book. (Or the comic shop just stopped ordering it due to the title change. I don't know which happened. It was one of my favorite titles, and I never even cared to find out its fate after the proposed change.)
The basic difference between doing this with Spider-Man and doing this with X-Men is cast size. SM is one character that needs to appear in every book bearing his name (or should), so that's fixed.
OTOH, merging AXM, UXM, NXM and XM into one book (presumably as UXM) would lead to either an unmanagably large cast, rotating casts as well as writers so you get separate books in all but name, or a load of characters going to limbo.
That is all well and good but the fact that I as a casual reader don't see any difference(except the cast) between the 3-5 main xmen books, is an indication that something isn't going right. I mean I have absolutely no idea why(story wise) I should be picking up lets say uncanny rather then adjectivles xmen.
While I couldn't care less about either SPIDER-MAN or the X-Empire, I was interested to hear this bit of news. Reminds me of the early-to-mid-90s when Superman had what was essentially a weekly series produced by four creative teams. It may not have provided the most interesting story, since the entire direction of the books were mandated by a commitee of writers and editors, but the continuity was tight and you got a new chapter of the story every week.
Look at something like Brubaker's recent year-long UNCANNY arc and ask yourself if it wouldn't have been nice to wrap up something that big in three months. And if the readers don't like it, as many plainly didn't, then at least something different would be coming down the pike much sooner.
Besides, this sort of thing HAS been done in both the S-M and X books many times since the late 80s. Think of the big summer crossovers that would run through every title in the line: MAXIMUM CARNAGE, X-CUTIONER'S SONG, etc. The only difference here is that it's supposed to be the new norm, rather than a limited program.
Of course, I have no doubt that it won't make much difference in a couple of years. Even if this is a hugely successful idea, they'll translate that as an excuse to pump more product into the market, which means that success with the weekly AMAZING book will bring us a weekly SENSATIONAL and FRIENDLY and WEB OF ..., on and on until the returns inevitably diminish. Then we'll get another big idea, and it wil all begin again.
All that said, I like this idea.
Well, the creative teams are pretty different, for starters. Astonishing is sort of a standalone, widescreen, "if you buy one X-book make it this one" kind of thing; Uncanny is (maybe) a little more classic, and "adjectiveless" is the theoretically "edgier" book that would probably be called X-Force if that title were still a draw.
As for dealing with the huge cast -- really, once you remove the characters that nobody cares about, is it *that* much bigger than in the 80s when there was only one book? (And monthly, at that?). It'd be easy to rotate members in and out without each writer having his/her own team. Seems workable to me.
(And for what it's worth, Somebody, I doubt New X-Men would be merged in with the other three, since it's essentially New Mutants/Generation X and not "X-Men" proper, despite the name.)
Well, why not rotating casts for an X-Men book? Maybe the best comparison would be the Justice League Unlimited cartoon. That had a core cast of seven characters, a few of which were in every episode, joined by whoever else that episode needed. Need to infiltrate Lex Luthor's headquarters? Have Batman call the Question. Need to kick some butt? Get Superman, Wonder Woman and a few of their buddies. Need an army? Call in everyone.
Why not try this with the X-Men and use a half dozen characters - say Cyclops, Emma, Wolverine, Beast, Rogue, and Cannonball - to anchor the series and rotate out the other characters as needed.
Come to think of it, given how unstable the roster was in the 80's, isn't this more or less what Chris Claremont was doing?
I think it's a good idea in general, as I've never seen the need for umpteen Spidey comics, but I wonder how long it'll last before secondary titles creep in again? I give it five years at most.
The potential problem I see with only having one title is that Marvel absolutely must make sure that the issues come out on time, which has not been a strength of theirs of late. If one of the creative teams falls behind, then those coming after will get held up, and we might end up with something like what happened to Wonder Woman, where a storyline gets abandoned in order to get things moving again. Crossover participation will only make that worse.
I personally would rather they move to having monthly anthologies - instead of a tri-weekly 22page comic have a monthly 66page comic with three stories. Not only would it save money (only one cover for example) but it would make it easier to have adverts and to cover for stories that are running late.
This is certainly a good idea, but really, if the editors were willing to do their jobs properly in the first place, then it would not be needed.
As for making sure that titles come out on time, the solution is obvious. Work three to six months ahead.
I feel like the JLU approach wouldn't work as well in X-books because the characters are organized very differently. The Justice League is somewhere between a government strikeforce and a pantheon of gods, the X-Men are a community. In my opinion the books need ongoing relationships to really work. That said three "X-Men" books plus New X-Men and X-Factor is spreading the characters pretty thin.
The overriding concern here seems to be ensuring that every X-character gets his time in the spotlight. The concept of "one team" raises memories of the late Seagle/Kelley and Davis runs, the only determined attempt at having one group of X-Men after Claremont's first run. This era of X-books suffered, I think, for ignoring too large a corner of the pool of developed characters. The brand has expanded to such an extent over the past decade and a half that precious little can justify ignoring this larger cast, especially with such personal investment on the part of the readership in particular characters and their subplots.
I am FLABBERGASTED.
How can you be in favour of this meatgrinder moneysponge BULLSHIT?
Have we all forgotten the 1990's COMPLETELY? The endless crossovers, the endless stunts, the shitty premises, the clones, the dreck. The TRIANGLES?
This is the enemy of creativity. THE ARCHFLAMINGFOE OF QUALITY. The last pretense of respect for the audience and for the talent has gone right round the U-bend.
Wow.
WOW.
It's shameless on EVERY level. And the worst part is that it comes as a SURPRISE to anyone. They've been TRAINING the reader for it for the last three years!
Awful. AWFUL.
//Oo/\
Forgive my ignorance, but in practice, how will this actually work? Will there be say a story A and a story B, and they'll just alternate between them every other issue? Or will it be one storyline that the writers will simply take turns doing, ala choose your own adventure?
Good question. Logically it should be writer/artist teams taking turn and turn about to do each complete story, or story arc. But will that work? Does it mean you'll have five or six issues of Team A, with Team B scheduled - and announced beforehand - to do the next run? What happens if one team is much more popular than another, and readers take to regularly dropping the book or picking it up again? The alternative, running different storylines/creative teams concurrently, seems to me to contain even more potential for destabilising the readership, and confusing them into the bargain.
They're doing different creative teams in rotating arcs, it appears. The editor was very clear, at least, that you wouldn't see any creators stuck doing part 3 of someone else's story.
Matt: I have no problem with the idea of multiple writers in service of an overall plot laid down from on high, as long as everyone involved understands that that's the deal. Virtually every worthwhile US TV drama series of the last ten years has been produced in that way.
Rotating creative teams between arcs raises another concern. Lacking a core team, what's to bind the talent to the title? That is, if no one team truly owns the book, what's to keep it coming back to tell the next arc? What is there to keep the teams rotating, in the strict sense of the word, rather than simply succeeding one after the next?
From a writer's standpoint, it might be less of a hassle just to tell one or two arcs in rotation and then redeploy elsewhere on another title to more independently pursue an ongoing story all his own. It wouldn't be a stretch to find Amazing degenerating into a series of mini-series by different teams contained within one title, in much the same way as Wolverine has been shipping lately, or Venom throughout the '90s (minus the "ongoing" part).
Hopefully, editorial will keep the arcs tightly connected, giving the book some kind of lasting direction, regardless of who's writing it.
Yeah, but hopefully the direction won't be overpowering either. There's no reason why Spidey can't get sidetracked from looking for Mr. Badguyofthehyear Man for a relatively silly three-issue interlude
Taibak: But the problem with JLU, as you might recall, is that precious few members of that enormous cast were developed very much, certainly not in comparison to the previous incarnation of "Justice League" which focused much more strongly on the core seven members.
Paul: Personally, I do see most of the X-books as having their own identity:
"Astonishing X-Men" is the "all-star" book, at least for the remainder of Whedon's run.
"Uncanny" is a bit of a modern update of Claremont classics.
"X-Men" is aiming for high concepts and unconventional stories (ie: Rogue absorbing eighteen billion people).
"New X-Men" is the kids' book (and it feels a bit more... open? In terms of content? Because the whole Limbo storyline doesn't chafe nearly as badly here as it did with "Inferno" and other stories linking the X-Men to The Voodoo That Belasco Do).
"Exiles" visits alternate dimensions, "X-Factor" is doing the street-level quasi-detective genre, C/D is a comedy... they're all distinctive on some level. Well, except for New Excalibur, and Paul Cornell will probably fix that.
Now, it's certainly true that there's no one direction for the entire line, but I question whether that was ever the case, even during the Grant Morrison years - after all, parallel to his run, Austen was doing... well, to this day I'm not sure what he was doing, but it certainly wasn't following Morrison's lead. And Claremont had that whole Destiny's Diaries thing.
Really, the only period I can think of when all X-books followed the same broad storylines was the early '90s, when Lobdell and Nicieza were basically writing the same story between them. Personally, I'd rather not go back to those times - better to have some diversity, and have each book do its own thing, than force the entire line into a direction that may or may not be ultimately successful.
Rotating creators certainly would seem to play havoc with any long term storylines. Morrison couldn't have done his New X-Men run anywhere near as well if he were trading off with two other creators in the same title. With Spidey, you won't even have the possibility of giving different characters to the different writers.
Mind, one could argue that Marvel is pretty poor at storylines that last more than one trade, so readers might not lose much overall.
Interesting concept. As Paul observes, the model here is US television dramas, but I can see pitfals to translating this into comics.
The most (creatively) successful U.S. tv dramas are driven by a strong executive producer who's also the creator and lead writer, and tend to drift off target when the creator moves on to other projects. Unless the new editorial team has a strong creative vision for the character, the consolidation will turn out to be nothing more than a sales stunt. Furthermore, even though tv dramas change writers and directors from episode to episode, the actors stay the same, as does the production team. To really compare what Marvel is trying to a tv show, you would need a series where the same character is played by a different actor in each episode, because that's the sort of visual dicontinuity that an artistic change implies. Unless Marvel is going with an artistic team that, collectively, is comitted to establsihing a roughly consistent "look" for the series, sales will fluctuate wildly from arc to arc as readers cherry-pick the styles they find most appealing.
What all of this really boils down to is a major shift in the way the individual writer-artist team relates to the title. If the new Amazing is going to work, it will require both close collaboration between the writers and artists on each arc and a strong editorial role in setting the overall creative direction of the title. Given that Marvel has gone in exactly the opposite direction in the past ten years or so, there could be serious culture shock and coordination problems of a sort that can contribute to creative unhappiness and delays. And that will kill this experiment at the start.
While I'm all in favor of cutting down on the number of Spider-Man titles, I don't think this rotating creative team is going to work in the long run. It would be fantastic if it did, and a huge improvement over the status quo, but my sense of Marvel as an organization is that it's too haphazard and conservative to really pull this off. I expect that Amazing will end up cutting back from three issues a month to two a month within the first year and a half, and will ultimately end up reverting to monthly status with a single creative team by the third year of the experiment. Then we'll see a raft of crap miniseries (Spider-Man vs. Venom! Spider-Man & Wolverine vs. Venom! Spider-Man & Venom vs. Wolverine! Spider-Man & Power Pack vs. Venom & Wolverine!) to fill out the shelves before the inevitable re-launch of Spectacular after five or six years.
I think Anonymous is right, and the chances of Marvel managing to impose a house style and keep characters on-model are fairly slim. That "iconic" Mary Jane cover is quite unrecognisable as Mary Jane Watson.
I buy Amazing religiously and have since 1982 or so, and have been buying Friendly but very close to dropping it. Not buying Sensational. But I will pick up the new Amazing, at least for now, because I do agree that this is a pretty good idea in concept. Execution is another thing, and not Marvel's strong point (I've thought a lot of their ideas lately like Civil War, the unmasking, etc. were good but boy, did they drop the ball on actually doing them).
> Unless Marvel is going with an artistic team that, collectively, is comitted to establsihing a roughly consistent "look" for the series, sales will fluctuate wildly from arc to arc as readers cherry-pick the styles they find most appealing.
Not going to happen - you might get readers dropping it if artists they hate come up, but you're not going to see Team A's issues selling markedly more than Team C's, with the way the Direct (comic shop) Market works. The book'll settle at a middle ground between Team A's ultimate potential audience and Team C's ultimate potential audience.
Marvel obviously hopes this "middle ground" will skew high, it may skew low. We'll see.
> (And for what it's worth, Somebody, I doubt New X-Men would be merged in with the other three, since it's essentially New Mutants/Generation X and not "X-Men" proper, despite the name.)
If you're merging books, it's a branding exercise. As of November, all ongoing, monthly or more-than monthly, Spider-Man books will be separated by imprint. ASM will be the MU book, USM the Ultimate U book and MAdventuresSM will be the "outreach" book.
Comparing it to X-Men, you would have it as Uncanny X-Men's the main MU book, New X-Men's the MU=kind-of-but-not-really-X-Men-book. Ultimate X-Men's the Ultimate U book and X-Men: First Class will be the "outreach" book. Spot the weakness.
The only way I could see NXM continuing as a separate book under a consolidation like that is to rename it without the "X-Men", be it New Mutants v3, Teen X, Slaughter X, X-Force, whatever. Otherwise, it would get rolled in.
So - if you actually buy all of the Spider-Man books at the moment, and you intended to keep doing so after the creative reshuffle, then this is a good thing. Without question.
I know it's a blog, but this is an awfully definitive statement. I currently read all the books, and I'm sure I'll read them after the change, but to say that this is an unqualified good...
I, and I'm sure many fans, enjoy reading different perspectives on SM. JMS does the big stories, Peter David focuses more on the supporting cast, and Sensational has kind of an old school feel. Personally, I think that overall, the books are stronger they've been in a while.
As to whether they "matter," part of me wants to say that, if the stories are good, it doesn't, well, matter. But the secondary books do matter. Sure, ASM sets the overall direction, like unmasking Peter Parker. But other two books deal with the fallout that JMS doesn't have the time or inclination to worry about. How does Peter's unmasking affect his work? His friends? The Daily Bugle? Those stories were covered in SSM and FNSM.
Could these stories all been told under one title? Sure, but not concurrently. And I really don't think it's all that big a deal if the stories don't all fit together perfectly, if an occurance in book A doesn't with something in book B. I learned long ago to accept that kind of thing when dealing with a shared universe.
I actually thought the template was "52," which sorta proved that a collaborative work with different artists and writers will still work in this day and age.
I think that 52/s main influence is more in the scheduling than the implementation - 52, after all, switched pencillers and inkers almost at random, and credited all the writers for all the issues, regardless of whether they wrote anything in any given issue.
The implementation here is rather different, and has more in common with the artist-rotation that Marvel's done on a few titles in the past few years (e.g. Exiles had Jim Calafiore alternating with other artists for most of the title's life until the start of the Claremont run), just extended to the writing as well.
Especially considering that it's the same editor as 52, Steve Wacker.
Didn't 52 fail on delivering its intended story, of filling in what happened during the missing year?
It did indeed, but then it also changed editor in mid-stream. But 52 was a book written by committee; I don't think that's what they're planning here.
Clay: Isn't that the problem though? Yes, there are great and worthwhile stories to be found amongst the fallout of big events. But if all the big events happen in one title while the other two deal with the ramifications of those events, doesn't that send the signal that the first title is the important one?
Didn't 52 fail on delivering its intended story, of filling in what happened during the missing year?
Yes, but that's a "thank God for small favors" kind of thing, because what we got was almost certainly more interesting then filling in that missing year would have been.
I'm really, really torn on this news, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, it's a huge step back from the virtues of the Jemas years, where individual creators could set more of the tone and the books could fulfill different artistic and storytelling niches. There's a lot of good aspects to that approach.
On the other hand -- particularly with solo characters like Spider-Man -- a big part of the lure is the ongoing soap opera of the protagonist's life, and certainly in that sense the more-frequent, single-book publication will work better. It really all comes down to implementation -- done competently, I think this angle could work exceedingly well for the character. But this is Marvel we're talking about, so eh. If nothing else, it shows a willingness to experiment with format and delivery, and that's generally a good thing.
They may not be doing a "written by committee" scenario, but they certainly don't want to end up with one creative team dominating the book (telling all the important stories, setting the overall direction), while the other two just tell generic Spider-Man stories with a few ongoing subplots.
If that happened, there probably wouldn't be any real sales increase over the current situation; in fact, they would probably lose sales, since there's inevitably going to be some Amazing readers who will drop the book under the new setup.
Well, I was oversimplifying. FNSM and SSM books certainly haven't ONLY been covering the fallout from ASM.
ASM is the flagship title of the company -- it SHOULD have the most important events happen in it. But the other titles have definitely made their contributions to the Spider-Man mythos.
Let me just add that there was a time when the Spider-books were in perma-crossover mode, a la Superman. It was during the Clone Saga.
Now, this will be different because one creative team will handle each arc instead of four teams per month. But this won't be the first time that Spidey-readers will be getting one continuous story. And we saw how well it worked the first time.
I can imagine many people just dropping it from subscriptions and many comic book stores getting sudden over-complicated descriptions in their comic book pull lists.
No one will really want every issue of ASM under these conditions, I am sure.
Oh, plenty of people will. I'm sure there are tens of thousands of readers who are already buying all three titles, and a significant chunk who WOULD buy all three if they genuinely believed that anything in the satellite books made the slightest difference.
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